This man has four children under eleven. They like flag football and singing. By the time he was twelve, he was already getting a reputation on the streets of Dorchester, in Boston.

For Father's Day weekend, we have decided to present the whole story here, unabridged. If you like it, we would also like to direct you to one of the great Reddit discoveries of our time: Infinite Wahlbergs. Enjoy the piece, and Happy Father's Day!
—The Editors

A guy walks into his doctor's office with a sore throat.

"You gotta help me, doc," says Mark Wahlberg to his ear-nose-and-throat man, who is wearing an old-school head mirror, cocked jauntily to one side like a crooked tiara. "I've been feeling crappy, but I can't afford to get sick right now—I've got sooo much going on."

Wahlberg's brow crinkles, he issues a piteous face. A dead-end kid impossibly grown up to be a Hollywood mogul, he still knows how to lay it on a little thick. Once called Marky Mark, a rapper known for dropping trou—a bit of exuberant stagecraft that propelled him to fame as a poster boy for Calvin Klein underwear—he is now forty-three. Married to ex-model Rhea Durham, he is the father of two boys and two girls, ages four to ten, a powerful actor/producer/entrepreneur whose secluded Beverly Hills compound is far from his beginnings in Dorchester, a working-class neighborhood in Boston, the youngest in a family of nine.

Wahlberg has just finished filming Transformers: Age of Extinction and The Gambler; he's getting ready to do Ted 2; the first Entourage movie is in postproduction—his charmed Hollywood life inspired the popular HBO series, which he produced. His family's reality series, Wahlburgers, feels a little like Entourage without the show-biz fairy dust. Boardwalk Empire, his award-winning drama, is heading toward its fifth-season finale. Wahlberg's frenetic work ethic bespeaks a man with a dark past who was granted a second chance. By the time Wahlberg was thirteen, he was using cocaine and other drugs; he was well known to local police; there was a civil action against him for harassing African-Americans. At sixteen, his assault of a Vietnamese man left the victim blind in one eye. After pleading guilty and receiving a two-year sentence, Wahlberg served forty-five days at the Deer Island House of Correction.

And so it is that every morning, almost without fail, Wahlberg attends Catholic mass (sometimes, if he's rushed, he'll only stop outside briefly for a prayer); the family goes to mass together on Sundays. He once had a rosary tattooed around his neck. Over several years, he underwent laser treatments to remove his seven tats, which required elaborate makeup coverage for some of his screen roles. His plan to take his two elder children with him to view the painful procedure—to demonstrate firsthand the evils of getting tattoos—lasted only one visit. Ella, ten, is in fifth grade; Michael, eight, is in second. As it was, the final of more than thirty treatments coincided with the attainment of his high school equivalency diploma, earned online at the suggestion of the principal of his former high school.

"I can't tell my kids to go to school and get an education if I don't have a diploma," he says. "They'd start thinking, Why do we need to go? You didn't go and you turned out all right. But I'm proud to have it. If I want to go on and further my education and study film or whatever, I can do that." The Mark Wahlberg Youth Foundation, which he started a decade ago with his brother James, works to give kids the advantages he never had, raising money to encourage mentoring and disbursing grants to organizations like Boys & Girls Clubs of America. One program sends underprivileged kids to summer camp.

Robert Trachtenberg

This morning, Wahlberg's body wasn't cooperating with his typically ambitious plans. He awoke with his throat on fire—it hurts to swallow, his glands are swollen, he feels like he's running a fever. His black T-shirt is clinging to his sculpted shoulders; he's hot and cold in waves.

The doctor's office is around the corner from bustling Rodeo Drive, in Beverly Hills. Wahlberg has been a patient for a number of years. As is customary, the men gab about the Lakers. Both were in attendance at the game the previous night at the Staples Center; both were accompanied by their sons.

With barely a warning, the doctor swabs the patient's throat. After a series of jocular comments between the men about the phenomenon of the gag reflex, the doctor leaves the exam room...

...And returns with a grave expression. "It's positive: You have strep."

Wahlberg's mouth drops open, literally. For one quick moment, he seems stunned, as if caught by a sneaky left cross. For the next two days, the studio scheduled more than a dozen press interviews in support of Transformers. This coming weekend, he's hosting Nickelodeon's Kids' Choice Awards. Despite the hype to the contrary, a slimefest is in the offing: wet green gunk raining down upon his head for a full thirty seconds. (Somehow he managed to get his kids in on the deal, to their obvious delight.)

Thumb wrestling.

Meanwhile, he's trying to gain twenty pounds of muscle he justlost.Transformers director Michael Bay has requested last-minute pickup shots. The movie's release is imminent, and Wahlberg has to look the same as he did during the hundred-day shoot. (For The Gambler, which he shot this winter, he was down as low as 135. For Transformers, he was around 185.) As part of his regimen, Wahlberg goes to sleep after dinner, at 6:45, and rises at 1:30 A.M. to work out. That way, he gets to be around when the kids wake up, he says. Sometimes he takes them to school. The makeup folks will have to deal with the fact that his hair is too short. But you get the sense that if he could do something to grow it out, he sure as shit would. Over the course of a two-day visit, his only moment of immodesty comes in his bragging about the cost efficiency of his production company's projects—not to mention Michael's four touchdowns in one flag-football game; Ella's amazing turns in her musical-theater productions; five-year-old Brendan's tenacity in the face of his older brother's taunts. Grace, four, is the baby. She clearly enjoys the role. On various occasions, Ella has declared her wish to exchange places and be the youngest, "just like Dad."

"You gotta check the house and see if anybody has a sore throat," the doctor says. "If they do, we need to swab and treat. Seeing you last night at the game with the two boys climbing all over you—if they don't have it already, there's a good chance they could get it. You're definitely contagious."

Robert Trachtenberg

Wahlberg's face flushes; he imagines a house full of sick kids. One of his wife's favorite memories of his fatherhood involves Ella as a toddler, sushi at Nobu, a fancy New York hotel room, and "massive" amounts of vomit in the middle of the night.

"We're all going on vacation a week from today," Wahlberg croaks.

The nurse comes in, carrying a tray with two syringes. I ask Wahlberg if he'd like me to leave. It's the third time I've asked—first when we entered the waiting room, and then again when we entered the exam room. He is usually accompanied everywhere by his body man, Henry, a real-life Turtle he's known for more than twenty-five years. But Henry is off on an errand; Wahlberg is not much used to being alone—hence the customary entourage and all the household helpers. He grew up in a crowded family in a crowded neighborhood. He and his brothers slept in the same room, sharing bunk beds. "Which was great at times and pretty traumatic at times when you were really young," he tells me a couple hours later, at our second lunch of the day. "You had brothers that were teenagers and they were doing shit that teenagers do, and you don't understand what it is or why they're doing it."

Is that why you once said you didn't feel safe as a child?

"I don't know why I said that or where it came from. It probably had to do with how I was feeling at the time or what I was talking about in particular. I think, for the most part, I had a pretty good childhood. It wasn't until we got older that we realized we didn't have what a lot of other people had."

You weren't hungry, though?

"No, it worked out because my dad drove a truck delivering school lunches, so that meant we got a lot of school lunches. We ate a lot of bologna sandwiches, but they also had those little Oreo packs in there sometimes."

Now the nurse picks up the first syringe. "I apologize in advance," she says.

On cue, the man once known as Marky Mark turns his back to the both of us and drops his jeans, pulls down his white boxer briefs to half-mast. He is part Irish and part Swedish; his skin fairly glows, the color of milk in the moonlight.

The medicine is viscous and goes in painfully. He winces as the plunger is depressed. "Yoooowwwwwww," he exclaims, the vowel sound straight out of Dorchester.

Thoroughly disarmed, I neglect to note what brand of boxer briefs he's wearing.

After school, at the neighborhood rec center, Wahlberg and his first son, Michael Robert, known to all as Mikey, toss a football back and forth. Whatever was in the shots yesterday has worked. Wahlberg feels great, he says, except for his ass, which still smarts. He's been up since 1:30 A.M. and seems full of energy.

It's an hour before flag-football practice; the exact starting time apparently has been miscommunicated. Henry is sitting at a picnic table. Sarah, his manager, is working her handheld device in the SUV in the parking lot. Ricky is the third spoke of this football catch. An athletic guy with biracial features, he's the manny who oversees the Wahlberg boys; there's a nanny for the girls.

"That's a good throw, dude," Wahlberg says to Mikey. "See? By the time you get to practice, you'll be all warmed up."

Sandy-haired and apple-cheeked, Mikey may well have been sent over by central casting to play the son of a pair of fabulous Beverly Hills parents. He was a little hesitant to get out of the car at first. He didn't want to arm wrestle Dad for the cameras yesterday, either.

Two nights ago, at the Lakers game, where Wahlberg and the two boys sat on the floor, Mikey had been taunting his little brother, Brendan, mercilessly. The game was against the Knicks. The main reason they went was because Brendan, who is in kindergarten, plays on a basketball team called the Knicks. So, of course, he loves the Knicks. And, of course, Daddy bugged his friend Ari Emanuel, the superagent, for the tickets, because he wanted to make his kid happy and because he could.

"The Lakers were up in the first half," Wahlberg says, his Dorchester brogue slightly evident, "and Brendan was upset. I'm like, 'It's okay, buddy, they can still come back and win.' And Mikey was, of course, rooting for the Lakers, just to torture his younga brotha. So I start rooting for the Knicks, because I know it's so important to Brendan.

"Then Mikey starts yelling, 'I hate the Knicks!' Loud! And it's like, Shit! You know? Because they had just met Carmelo Anthony and Amar'e Stoudemire and all the guys in the locker room before the game…." He shakes his head, at once mortified and amused. "I try to remind my kids what my mom always said. All she ever wanted was for all of us to get along."

"My dad was the best," Wahlberg says, "though my parents divorced when I was ten or eleven. I was pretty young. It was pretty hard." He watches Mikey throw another pass, adds a little body English to help Ricky catch this one. You can tell he'd rather be playing.

"I was close to my dad because I was the youngest, so even before I was in school I was spending time with my dad. I would go to work with him when he drove his truck and delivered to all the schools. You know, both my parents worked very hard to put food on the table, so we didn't get the kind of time that I would have liked with him, especially when they got divorced. I remember thinking it was all about me and, you know, wanting them to be together. But it was obvious they were better apart than together.

"I remember sitting with him in the kitchen while he was listening to Al Jolson, having a Schlitz, smoking his Winstons, flicking the ash—you know, he'd be in the backyard or in the garden, and he'd flick the ash into the cuff of his pants; he didn't want to flick the ash in his backyard. It was the first and only house he ever owned. And he bought it after winning a bet with a bookie."

What sport?

"I don't know. He won like fifteen hundred bucks. He loved the dogs, he loved the horses, he loved the track, loved to play cards.

"Eventually, my dad had a couple strokes. For a while, he lived with different siblings. Then he moved into a Catholic assisted-living home in South Boston and started getting better. I went from thinking, you know, every time I saw him might be the last time to thinking, Well, no. He's going to be here forever. But then it took a bad turn."

Did he get to meet your kids?

"He met Ella. And I also have a picture of me, Mikey, and my dad. I actually named him Mike because my dad had called me Mike ever since I was seven years old."

Really?

"Well, he used to call me Monkey, and I started to get really annoyed with it. So I had my first sit-down heart-to-heart with my dad and I said, 'Dad, I got to talk to you. I don't like the name Monkey.' So he's like, 'Well, I'm sorry. I won't ever call you that again. What do you want me to call you?' And I said, 'I like the name Mike.'

"So he had called me Mike ever since. When I was thirty-something years old, in the middle of my career, I'd go to the assisted-living home and they would say, 'Hey, your son Mark's here.' And he'd be like, 'I don't have a son named Mark. His name is Mike.'

"When I told him I named my first son Mike, he got a big smile on his face. He died when my wife was pregnant with my little guy, Brendan. It was so weird, too. Because Brendan—there were so many things about Brendan that reminded me of my dad. Just the way he looked. He had this bald head. He'd frown and get these crinkles in his forehead."

To demonstrate, Wahlberg crinkles his brow—just as he'd done unconsciously in the doctor's office.

We head to another field nearby, where flag-football practice is supposed to be held. Ricky and Mikey are in the backseat of Wahlberg's black Mercedes, roomy but not ostentatious. Wahlberg and I are in front. We sit and chat and wait. It's a little weird talking with Mikey in the car, so I ask him if he's going to the Kids' Choice Awards to see his dad be the host.

"Oh, yeah, he's going," Wahlberg says, full of mysterious portent.

"Why wouldn't I be going if my dad is hosting?" Mikey asks.

We sit a while longer eyeballing the field, with that feeling you get when you're waiting somewhere and it ain't happening. Clearly, there is no team of mini football players—only a group of big boys gathering for a soccer game. Using his corded black earpiece, Wahlberg leaves a message for his wife—thereafter a flurry of texts is received and sent. Finally, a phone call. Wahlberg gets a tone in his voice. Several pointed endearments are employed prior to his hanging up.

We go back to the rec center, which includes one of those antique multipurpose gymnasiums, a little gem complete with a stage and a beautiful hardwood short court facing eight-foot hoops. Wahlberg heads to the office, where he knows the coach and the other staffers. Four kids have lots of activities to schedule. Turns out the Wahlbergs missed an e-mail. Practice had been canceled.

Wahlberg sighs audibly.

All three staffers in the tiny room freeze….

We stand under the hoop like any pair of fathers, talking and rebounding while the kids—Mikey, Henry, and Ricky—are having all the fun. "I think the most important thing is to always be involved in every aspect of their life," Wahlberg says. "To give them enough trust that they can share things with you. I don't want them to be terrified of me, you know? But I don't want them to think they can do whatever they want and get away with it, either, because they can't.

"The biggest thing for me is, you know, as quickly as I was able to turn it around, to get from there to here, from me having nothing as a kid to me here now, providing everything for my kids, it's like, I worry that maybe they won't appreciate things. I worry that maybe they'll have a sense of entitlement. You don't wanna give your kids everything without giving them the tools to be great people."

Unable to contain himself, Wahlberg takes one of the rebounds and slams down a thunderous dunk.

Mikey cheers, as do Ricky and Henry and the basketball coach, who is sitting on the stage, hanging out. Then Mikey comes close and reaches up, grabbing a fistful of Wahlberg's T-shirt.

"Daddy, please? Can we do a game?"

Wahlberg looks at me with that same piteous green-eyed twinkle from the doctor's office the previous day.

"Me and you versus Henry and Ricky," Mikey commands. "Henry! You're with Ricky!"

Wahlberg unburdens himself of his keys, phone, and shades. He jogs athletically down to the other end of the court, Mikey skipping alongside, a Snoopy dance of celebration.

"What are we playing to?" asks Wahlberg. "Eleven? Sixteen? Thirty-two?"

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